skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A better title: "An English-only spellchecker with a fixed, static vocabulary used to be a major feat of software engineering".

(because other cases still pretty much are)
I think search engines will always be major feats of engineering - the big difference between a spell-checker and a search engine is in the former the problem space rarely evolves.

An English dictionary, for example, only has a a small number of words added each year. A search engine is a different thing entirely: not only are new items added all the time, but the format of these items evolves. Today search engines need to deal with non-textual formats such as videos, images, and audio. This is a very difficult problem.

The fact that there are now APIs and libraries that let developers use things like latent semantic mapping without having to roll their own algorithms and solutions can certainly make writing an intelligent textual search engine a lot easier than it used to be.

But the key difference here is that what we demand from a 'search engine' (and by this I mean Google, or Bing) ten years will be much greater than what we demand now. We'll have new media to search for, new types of queries, new expectations. But a spell checker will always be a spell checker.

At least, that's my opinion. I'm sure someone will disagree!
I had that too. To fix the flickering, I found installing https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nnevod.log... and setting up my own (slightly brighter) curve made the problem go away. It seems the default auto algorithm doesn't sample the ambient light levels over a sufficiently long time period, resulting in too many small changes in brightness.
Incumbents usually have an easier time raising money. They already have contacts from the first campaign just a few years ago. And I don't have any hard data but I was under the opposite impression.
Dropbox looks like the best option to me. I've got it on my laptop, desktop, Android phone and BlackBerry PlayBook.
"Logos may be protected under copyright as artistic works and many trade marks may therefore also be copyright works."

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-applies/c-applies-faq/c-a...
Chartbeat can speak to this a bit: http://chartbeat.com/labs/totaltotal/

You'll need a big monitor, as this was a quick hack and doesn't function very well on small screens, but you can see the number of people using IE across all of the sites our JS is loaded on in real-time.
That's a great question and the answer is not now. However it seems like there certainly should be. Maybe users could enter a URL for their review as a substitute for the review text. I will follow up with you if/when this is available.
Indeed, there are lessons here, especially from people like PHK and projects like Varnish. Understanding the underlying system is critical for these sorts of projects. For 99% of users the OS will do a much better job of handling your resources than you ever will, but there will always remain a segment where additional knowledge about how those resources are going to be used can yield significant performance gains.
Wow 256K, the luxury!

Apple //e, 64K memory (possibly 128K if you had the memory expansion card) (The Apple ][+ only had 48K)

You start with the 143K floppy containing the word processor in Drive 1 (S6,D1) and the floppy with your document in Drive 2 (S6,D2). Edit away, remember to save occasionally.

When you were done with your rough draft you save your file and exit the word processor and swap in the floppy containing the spell check program. Point it at your file and swap in the floppy with the dictionary. Work through the file and approve/reject it's suggestions.

Exit the spell check and swap in the word processor floppy...

Repeat as often as necessary.
> I'm not a designer

Yet you attempt to critique using phrases like "sleek" and "clean".
Interesting. First of all it's very nicely designed and after reading the introduction I like the philosophy behind it. Taking the Instapaper approach of focussing on text is interesting. While images and graphics can often enhance content having nice, plain text on a device the size of the iPhone makes much more sense. So first impressions of it are good. Hopefully the content is just as good.

Update:

After reading a couple of the articles it seems pretty high quality and justifies the price. It's also only the second good Newsstand app I've used (The New York Times is the other). I've tried several others and they are just 100's of space consuming images, difficult to read especially on the iPhone.
Was interested, so for anyone else that might be:

Google Cache Image (Screenscrape): http://cl.ly/image/1B0c1R0c2q2y

Google Cache (Text Only): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kGHnuJH...
> They are indeed asking for uniformity against creativity

Well, I mean you could argue that this is clever, creative and beautiful ( http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Confessions-rachetingDateObj... ). To quote one of the comments "If I lean close enough to the PC's speaker, I can hear the tiny clicks of all those wheels spinning round - 'sbeautiful."

I don't think google is really arguing against creativity, rather saying "don't be creative for creativity's sake".

I remember having to install Quartz Scheduler so it would hit a single servlet every night at 1am. That's _ALL_ Quartz was used for. When I asked about using cron the response was "well that wont scale"... this application had been around for fifteen years and during that time there was only one batch process... clever indeed!
Someone should build a service on top of Stripe to do this.
As an aside, http://thatconf.chrisjpowers.com/ features what I will give my "Annoying Hipster Presentation Style Of The Month" award. Can't we just have information without all the JS supa-awesumness, just because we can?!?!
Nike LeBron X 10 Olympic Sport Pack
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Ask HN: What's your favorite web analytics provider?
I've been using Google Analytics for a number of years (free version for personal website). It seems every few months or so a feature is "removed" so to speak (e.g. keywords of searches, masked domain names, etc.). As far as I understand, these features once prevalent are blocked for the premium service as well.

What are the better options out there, in your opinion? Free and premium, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Here—have a microbenchmark!

Here are two really simple mutexes: a wrapper around the pthread functions, and a no-thought-required spinlock:

class Spinlock {
private:
bool state;
public:
Spinlock() { state = false; }
void lock() {
while(!__sync_bool_compare_and_swap(&state, false, true));
}
void unlock() {
state = false;
__sync_synchronize();
}
};

class PthreadMutex {
private:
pthread_mutex_t mutex;
public:
PthreadMutex() {
pthread_mutex_init(&mutex, NULL);
}
void lock() {
pthread_mutex_lock(&mutex);
}
void unlock() {
pthread_mutex_unlock(&mutex);
}
~PthreadMutex() {
pthread_mutex_destroy(&mutex);
}
};

I used these to protect a not-optimized-at-all dispatch queue built on top of std::deque (single reader, single writer, reader busy-waits until work is available, work is an empty function). I did this test on Mac OS X 10.6.8 (with Apple
s gcc 4.2.1 build).

A run using PthreadMutex:

0,5944405
1,1627173
2,135598
3,363801
4,3360217
5,5773374
6,5727638
7,5953505
8,4567648
9,5106300

Using Spinlock:

0,154817
1,187507
2,145171
3,102454
4,180604
5,155360
6,128448
7,82418
8,49538
9,39560

All times are in microseconds to run 1,000,000 iterations of the test. Only time to enqueue is measured.

I've seen similar results with a very similar test on FreeBSD, though I don't have a box to retest on at the moment.

I can only conclude it's not at all unreasonable for PostgreSQL to use its own spinlocks.
You've still got a driver program that coordinates the massively parallel stages, most likely, and a less-scalable dispatch process where not all nodes are yet doing work.
Why using kernel spinlock do not made programs slow?
Great change. I'm glad Facebook is experimenting with features -- and I'm also glad that when the features turn out to be user-hostile, they have the power to remove them.

I have always found the authenticated referrals, in particular, extremely sketchy. It seems my persistence in clicking "Mark As Spam" on these types of stories has paid off. :)
Keep in mind, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law was posed at the very beginning of parallel computing. Seymour Cray later became famous both for his fast uniprocessor supercomputer and his quip "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?"

For most embarrassingly parallel problems, a Hadoop or BOINC-like cluster made from commodity hardware may always be cheapest. But "real" supercomputers and clusters will spend the most money to reduce bottlenecks precisely because they want to run those programs that are the most limited by them.
The university I went to covered threading in the operating systems class (4th year undergrad), iirc. Working through an online tutorial for java concurrency might be beneficial?
Ahh, I do believe I can share some insight here.

That Sybase implemented its own threading was actually quite an astute decision at this time. We're talking early to middle nineties when threading provided by the operating systems was in a, charitably put, pretty unstable state. We're talking of a time when a gig of physical memory was not that bad for a database server.

The reason why Sybase failed (relatively to Oracle at least) had nothing to do with threading, but with the fact that Sybase did not support row level locking and adamantly refused to implement it.

From a purely theoretical position Sybase was right. If your database application is well designed, page level locking has a number of advantages. Namely in much less resource usages and less requirements for internal housekeeping tasks. While a page level managed database is not quite maintenance free it is much more so then when the data is row organized.

The problem, however, was that the real world is not a theoretical thing and the various application suites (SAP R/3 PeopleSoft, etc), which boomed around that time, absolutely required row level locking. PeopleSoft actually did run on Sybase, but performance was, again charitably put, difficult.

It didn't help that Sybase, at that time, released Sybase 10, which was an dreadful product, quality wise. From what I heard (and yes, this is hearsay) was that engineering implored on senior management to give it six month more time, which they refused to do.

While I never heard about data corruption on Sybase 10 databases, the quality was quite horrible. Couple this with Sybase' arrogance as a high flyer at that time chiding their customers for their own quality issues was not a smart move.

But the main issue was row level locking and certainly not the threading architecture.

Two additional points: The new Sybase kernel (15.7) actually uses OS threads as a default. You can still use the internal scheduler, but according to Sybase most installations should profit from the new kernel.

The other thing is that it's rather ironic that SAP bought Sybase (it's marketed now as SAP / Sybase), which somehow brings the whole story full circle.

I work with Sybase products since 4.2, which is early nineties and I worked for Sybase Professional Services from 95 - 99. Which makes me believe I'm somewhat qualified to comment on the issue.
Could you elaborate? I'm seriously considering buying one. Have you compared it against the Kindle?
Doesn't work on Firefox for Android.
I agree with everything you're saying, I just think the 'obvious point' is one that's papered over in the public discourse a lot because it's not exciting.

It is interesting why they don't scale linearly and I agree that it's probably a combination of memory bus contention and/or the chip itself being a little slower.

The whole bulldozer thing seemed like a marketing stunt rather than thoughtful pursuit of higher performance to me. Given the frequency and cost of cache miss rates, Intel HT seems to get the same work done on fewer watts.
A Bash Script for Quick Whois Queries
Not all of Kutcher's investments are public ... just saying
Yes, this is a misstep for an app of this nature. Instapaper needs to support the iPad 1 for another cycle.
Login Screen – behind the scenes
From the help button in the top right, it looks like you can rotate and flip the components. (To GP)It definitely wasn't the easiest to find, maybe have a tutorial video showing how you are doing some of the things like rotating and moving traces to the bottom layer in the main video? Looks pretty good so far though; I might give it a try later with a board I've made before.

[Edit] A grid would be killer too; great suggestion.

[Final Edit] Tooltips on the components/actions would help your goal of making electronic design simpler/easier to do.

Selecting: Hold down shift and left click elements.
Box select: Hold down shift and drag a box around the elements to be selected.
Deselect All: Left click on the canvas.
Move Element: Just drag it.
Connect Terminals: Drag from schematic terminal to other schematic terminal.
Disconnect Terminal: Left click terminal. Click 'X' .
Rotate Element: Select element and push 'r'.
Remove Element: Select element and push 'del'.
Flip Element Horizontally: Select element and push 'h'
Flip Element Vertically: Select element and push 'v'
Johnny Depp Not Dead, But Alive And Better Than Ever
Did they completely fail to notice the API was still in use, or just not care? Thou shalt not break working code.
Microsoft To Make Same Privacy Change Google Was Attacked For; No One Cares
Piwik is pretty good for a free one. Has an Android app too (I assume iOS as well).
Acing a top-tier tech interview
I highly doubt these terms were lifted from another app/service.

I believe the goal of this app is Sportbook related - but with a twist: it's a game right now. But I see people being upgraded to a "game for fun" to as a "Look how much money you can make if this was real money." Like Zynga Poker - but the end goal isn't you buying more Zynga poker chips to play for fun, but rather bet real money on sports.

No idea who is behind this, but I wouldn't be surprised if a Sportsbook in Costa Rica, UK or Europe is bankrolling/investing in this. The Sportbook industry is declining each year as less and less people are gambling on sports as it seems the 20-30 year olds aren't as interested as the generations before them. This is a great way to create a new generation of sport gamblers.

My 2 cents.
Could anybody tell me, is it OK if I just come and listen as a novice?
I'm not so sure this is true, although it is the standard thought of public education as a public good.

I seem to remember homeschooling being a rare thing when I was younger, but now it's at 2..9%(0). I heard a story the other day about a service that allows teachers to sell their curriculum (1), so there is definitely a sphere here that's available. I think that, although RT is horribly biased, the premise that _coercing_ children to stay in class isn't a net positive for society in any sense; instead, make education a good that children _want_, and we'll likely see the entire provision system improve.

Forcing consumption of the same good on people is surely going to be net negative for society, even if that good is deemed by society to be important.

---
(0) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_in_the_United_Sta...
(1) http://www.kansascity.com/2012/10/11/3862033/teachers-make-m...
and who doesn't love bacon as well?
Reading the MSDN page posted on a previous comment, it looks like they are deprecating activex interface for IE. Flash, Silverlight and any other plugin using activex to interface more directly with hardware will be affected.
I'm more of a fan of Marco-the-Instapaper-developer than Marco-the-fledgling-pundit, but I really want to read that Alex Payne article. Hmmm.
A huge chunk of Facebook's revenue comes from Zynga. Wall St will not be pleased.
So you're crying foul because something marked as deprecated for quite some time was taken offline? That's completely and entirely your own fault. Twitter has done nothing wrong actually.
Obsessed - Retry mechanism for Node.js and the browsers
Violentacrez is a scumbag and the fact that redditors are willing to stand behind him as some sort of show of reddit brotherhood is a large part of the reason why I don't go there much anymore.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7... ; let me know if that helps.
I got one layer deeper. I googled the same thing, but I ended up here back at HN because this very conversation has already been indexed and is now a top search result.
Quite interesting concept. Do you guys give real money?
Something specific for the candle lighting ceremony, perhaps? Usually there's a snippet of a song played for each candle - something themed to the party lighting the candle, played just long enough to let them make their way to the front of the room. For this I could see a 'fadeout after X seconds' setting or a 'fadeout when I press a button' setting. Since the snippets are short, I could also see people wanting to cue up a spot in the middle of a track - the chorus, not the opening.

Otherwise I can't think of much of a difference.
Yep. Really nice-looking graphics can be done with computations that parallelize nicely over individual triangle vertices and individual pixels.

The gameplay logic and networking code for most games could probably be optimized for many cores than it usually is. But again, the primary consideration is that it plays well for everybody.
>They're horrible and should never have been created.

Do you have a better way to add functionality to a closed source browser?
Here's the Real Reason Java EE Lost and Spring Won
Silverlight can enforce protected streams to the output devices. I couldn't play netflix streaming movies on my old monitor since it didn't support HDCP.
"A potentially simpler alternative is to let the application itself tell the scheduler that one of its processes is special. PostgreSQL could request that its dispatcher be allowed to run at the expense of one of its own workers, even if the normal scheduling algorithm would dictate otherwise."

I don't see how this is so bad, it seems like the best solution too me. If you're writing a specialized high performance piece of software I feel like the application developer should be the one tasked with making sure the kernel knows certain things about it's application. It's pretty clear a project like postgres is doing all sorts of tricks and optimizations already, I don't see how this would be any more or less burdensome.

Overall I feel like it's a fair trade-off to have kernel be told specific things by the application so it can make the better scheduling decisions vs it having to guess and potentially make poor decisions at the expense of most common applications.
I was ready to be on board with this just because Gawker is such a mess, but anyone that follows r/SubredditDrama knows of Violentacruz and r/creepshots just shouldn't exist. I find it surprising that Reddit moderators are going so far as to do this for the sake of someone that is putting hundreds, if not thousands, of women at risk of being stalked or otherwise victimized by the type of people that think there's nothing wrong with posting pictures them to gawk at or make fun of. I really wanted a site like Reddit to work and be able to function without too much politics or this kind of childish crap, but this is really taking the cake and encouraging me to build out another alternative.

There was a great discussion on the implications a subreddit like r/creepshots can have on r/TwoXChromosomes last week. I haven't visited the site yet today, but I'd imagine they just alienated their entire female userbase (myself included), as if the users of that site didn't do enough of that already.

Edit: Can I get explanations for the downvotes?
Tries for dictionaries are the simplest method. However, it limits the search method to forward-only. For more sophisticated dictionary searches there is DAWG:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_word_graph

http://www.pathcom.com/~vadco/cwg.html (a highly compressed DAWG derivative)
Google has a 30-day guarantee for it.

It broke on day 35.

It's now under Samsung's 12-month limited warranty. No refunds, no exchanges, just repairs, unfortunately.
What you are quoting is true when buttons are occupying mostly white space.

When the buttons are tightly packed, as live tiles are in Windows 8, the rounded corners clash with eachother and the negative space distracts away from the content within the tile.

Source: I'm designing a Windows 8 phone launch app.
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4636362
I wrote a spellchecker in the 80's for the Commodore 64. Step 1 was writing an efficient data transfer algorithm to move the bits off of the disk so that the 1541 drive could hit the sector interleave (it would miss it using its built-in data transfer algorithm). This sped up IO by 500%. But for reference that was still only about ~25kbps, or a bit slower than a 28.8kbps modem. Step 2 was coming up with a data compression algorithm that exploited the distribution of the top 30 or so 2/3-grams in English. I had a dictionary of about 80K words.

I can confirm this is on the order of several months worth of work :)
Sorry but I just can't follow the logic here.

The Flash whitelist is only for the formerly-called-Metro immersive browser that will primarily be used on touch-based tablets. It does not affect desktop IE10.

Many Flash apps were designed for big screens and mouse interaction where pointer precision is great. Now you're throwing them onto a screen that's smaller and using a fat finger to emulate a pointer when the Flash app's target areas weren't designed for that.

Now certainly, some Flash apps will work. Other apps will not because they just weren't built with this environment in mind. If the user ends up running one of the apps that fail, they will have a bad experience. It happens all the time with the iPad where Flash doesn't work at all.

To improve the experience, you could make a whitelist of apps that work, or a blacklist of apps that fail. Which implementation you might choose would depend on whether you expect more good or bad apps, the complexity of managing the list, the impact of failure on the user, etc.

Is this really so controversial?
Time Any Function in Go
Stripe for payment, Persona for auth.
IFixit tears into the new iPod touch, bemoans lack of repairability
Failure as an acceptable outcome
The NoSQL Movement — What is it?
Rdigitalife: Social currency – creating new value in digital age
I do this with perl. I use emacs' cperl mode, but I have Ctrl+x t bound to perltidy-buffer, which formats everything for me. I've modified the rules slightly (people at my work like tabs instead of spaces) but I tend not to spend too much time worrying about stylistic formatting rules.

Of course, this does not apply to some areas of vertical white-space, which I still have to manage myself.
CloudSpring | Incapsula: Security in the Cloud
Firefox 16 pulled just after release to address security vulnerabilities